2019

This post has been floating around the depths of my Google Drive for weeks, but I never got around publishing it earlier as I'm an insecure little shit when it comes to writing. What you're reading right now is an earnest attempt at giving you a glimpse of my 2019. It's unusual for me to be hesitant about publishing certain posts, but my tendency to document everything and throw it onto this blog has certainly become more muted-down. The constant analyzing through writing my life down into diaries dulls the story and the vividness of its characters. To ruin each and every authentic experience by writing it down. To mull over our own feelings and think in circles until we can't even look at these projections of ourselves anymore. I'm worried that publishing these stories would turn it all into some faint ghost-story of what it was.

Taking into consideration that we can't win and that real-life experiences will always take the upper hand, there is no harm in trying to convey what means the most to us, right? If losing is inevitable, why not lose in the most dramatic way possible, while doing what we love?

Maybe this post is nothing more than an attempt to alleviate my constant restlessness. Maybe I just can't keep shit to myself. Maybe screaming into the void (aka the world wide web) will make me feel in control of my thoughts instead of the other way around. Regardless, writing is fun, and I've missed doing it on this blog! How I miss having these little chats with my readers (to all three of you, I see and appreciate you)! How I love writing down my embarrassing existential angst as you look at your computer screens in utter confusion!

Speaking of shitty writing, I recently wrote the final entry of my 7th diary. I always conclude a finished diary by writing something on the back cover that either represents how I feel or how I would like to feel. When I found myself writing that final entry, I had a hard time picking out the right words to write. For the first time in a while, what I wanted to feel like was actually how I felt. To distinguish longings from feelings is hard. Perhaps I'm looking for a distinction that doesn't even exist. A jagged skyline in the distance where skyscrapers seem to evaporate into grey skies.

(A fragment from the final entry)

... Another thing I've been trying to wrap my head around: nothing truly lasts forever, even though we feel like it does. It's easy to put that off as corny and put ourselves above such Tumblr-Esque statements, but we play music, write stories and spam our Instagram feeds all in order to make it last. Along the way, these stories end up living a life of their own and are talked about, watched, laughed and cried over by people who never experienced it in the first place. In that sense, nothing lasts forever, but we all feel like it does, and maybe that's what a 'Forever' really is? The big 'Forever' is scary because it implies that our thoughts and feelings are never-ending, meaning that sadness and fear are also a constant in our lives.  

.... 

"What makes you feel in love with the world around you?" 

"Riding my bike and listening to music. When a song comes on mid-conversation and it happens to be my favourite. Being with my friends: watching them paint in their bedroom or discuss the importance of ketchup on fries or share secrets. Singing along to music when I'm in the car with my siblings. Taking walks on Winter days when the sun is shining. I feel in love with the world around me when I love fearlessly and boundlessly." 

....  

"What's your biggest fear?" 

"Do you mean specific fears or big, existential fears?" 

"Up to you to decide" 

"I think I'm most scared of loneliness. I'm afraid that there will always be a little corner of my consciousness where I am essentially alone. The thought of being alone forever is truly fucking scary. Forever, because everything is infinite. That infinity on itself, even. Sometimes I feel like we're all lines parallel from each other and that we never truly intersect. What if I can come infinitely close, but never touch? What if we're truly alone, to mathematical infinity? Forever?" 

After a lot of thinking, I decided upon the following sentence from Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex".

There is nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.

Looking back at the entries I wrote over the year, there was no better way to end this diary. Writings from a time in my life where each experience was in high resolution and every color was as vibrant as it was artificial. Neon lights and pitch-black nights. An entire year of contrast. A time in which I finally figured out that I was someone to other people and I got to find out who that someone was. Why hold on to only one version of ourselves when there are so many possible projections of our hearts and minds? I can be a sister, a friend, a stranger and a writer simultaneously, and I'm changing identities as we speak (or write, in this case).

You could go as far as saying change isn't necessarily linear. That I will always remain the same person despite having nothing in common with my previous self. That these versions are mere projections of who we are. Is your current self nothing more than the sum of an infinite amount of past selves? Isn't that a Scary and Depressing thought on this Saturday afternoon?

When discussing this with a friend earlier this year he pointed out that "you can never go back to old selves. Change is linear because you will always know more than you did before." Perhaps knowledge is the driving force behind change. Personally, I hope both statements are true and that we have everything and nothing in common with ourselves.

If they were, in fact, both correct, I would always be true to myself, even without trying. No matter how much I change, how much I get hurt, how much I hurt others, how much I love you, how much I write, how much I learn.

I will always be me.

There is no one I could be, nothing I could do, nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.